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Unique Simpian

Each Simpian has a unique genome with a unique life experience, this genome dictates the simpians strength, agility, and intelligence that affect various elements in the game such as moving speed, gathering rate, field of vision, attack and defense. The experience gained through a lifetime builds upon your genomic properties to increase these qualities.

Simpian Appearance

The Simpian genome expresses their appearance - body shape, hair style, eye colour, skin thickness, are among some of the characteristics.

Life Experience

The Simpian life experience also modifies their appearance showing the aging process, weight, and happiness.

Diseases

Deadly unique diseases spread and mutate throughout the world and affect each Simpian in a different way depending on the genome which might give one Simpian the resistance needed in order to survive while others will struggle, it is always a good idea to have genetic diversity within your tribe.

Simpian Lifetime

Each Simpian has a lifespan, they start as babies, grow older, possibly have their own children and die. The children of course take on the genomic qualities of the parents and transfer experience though the parents as they are brought up by them, and so generations of Simpians go by as you navigate their existence.

Match Maker

As a player you are the tribes, matchmaker, you have the ability to overwrite who hooks up with who, so if you want to strong, purple looking, thick skinned, bushy haired, large eyes, intelligent simpians, well you can try to do that.

Unique World

Each Simpian world has unique properties and unique landscape that is procedurally generated featuring mountain ranges, lakes and rivers, forests, deserts, grasslands, and wildlife to hunt.

Tribe Tasks

Each Simpian can gather food, hunt wild animals, train for experience, defend against aggressors, or raid other tribes.

Multiplayer

Live along other tribes of hunter-gatherers controlled by other players, you can cooperate in order to assist each other, or you can become hostile and plunder your neighbours.

Dynamic Landscape

The land is dynamic, food grows during the spring and snow hampers movement and gathering during winter, overuse and abuse of the land will turn grasslands and forests into desolate deserts, while a proper stewardship and management of the land can yield new opportunities of growth and sustainability.

Persistent World

Constant real time pace of the world goes by several game years per day, or roughly a generation or two per week.

Emergent Gameplay

The game is created to be very dynamic almost emergent and chaotic in nature, no one really knows what will happen? what will happen to the landscape? as you swap villagers with other tribes how will the local population of a world look like as opposed to another world? what strategy will work to survive the longest?

Multi-World

Top tribes in a aging world will have ability to migrate to a new world to continue their legacy in a new challenging environment.

Challenging!

The greatest challenge in the game will be surviving, and it may take several tribe attempts to be able to learn how to live sustainably along with other players and with the land.

No Pay-to-Win

No player gets an advantage in any specified world, and no useless flair/customization is available for purchasing. Each world is proportionally priced based on computing cloud usage plus the upkeep, hence the audience will push the boundary of specified limits and simulation complexity based on demand. There is plans for free worlds for demonstration purposes.

As a player you are the tribe's match maker, you can overwrite and match Simpians to their mates hence guiding natural selection of your tribe genomic destiny. You will decide the roles of your Simpians as who will go on raiding the neighbouring tribe or hunting wild animals. You will also navigate your tribe in a procedurally generated world filled with finite resources and other players who are trying to survive. As the generations of your tribe go by you will have the ability to view the ancestors of your tribe and witness how player controlled natural selection takes its course. Once the player has survived the test of time a story will slowly unveil revealing a deep entertaining background story of Simpians.

A game like this will show people how important it is to live sustainably given finite resources, and how important cooperation is to survival. Perhaps the game will also demonstrate how humanity is really a giant single distant family as we witness genomes mix, flow, and saturate throughout the population. Perhaps the data collected in this game will shed new insights into evolution and the study of genomics? so lets take a step forward in gaming simulation complexity to a new level!

Q

When will it be available?

The release dates are subject to change but the following dates are planned:

Pre-Alpha/Alpha: Started in December 2013

Beta: TBA

Public Release: TBA

Q

How much will it cost?

The cost will be somewhat unique and original that has never been tried before (at least to my knowledge). No player gets an advantage in any specified world, and no useless flair/customization is available for purchasing. Each world is proportionally priced based on computing cloud usage, except free worlds, hence the audience will push the boundary of specified limits and simulation complexity based on demand, and as cloud computing cost decreases over time so will the cost of Simpians.

They're will be two types of worlds, free and paid. Free worlds will be very tough to survive and are meant as an introduction to the game. The cost of all other worlds will be a relatively small monthly service cost (the price of a coffee?) which will be calculated proportionally based on the cloud computing cost with a markup.

This new model will have the following effects, it will let players drive the level of world computing complexity that is created by demand, and players are treated with respect and will know exactly what they are paying for - no artificial barriers will be placed in the game just to maximize profits and the act of price gouging the gaming experience. There will be no pressure on the players to pay to get the full experience or to get an advantage over other players. Let's show the world how gamers should be treated while driving up the innovation of computationally complex gaming!

Q

What is the gameplay like?

As the player your responsibilities to your village are as follows:

Match Simpians to their mates as you see fit (they will automatically match but as a player you can override their matches).

Assign one of three roles of each Simpian, a gatherer, a defender/attacker/hunter, or idle.

Set the movement location on the map as you roam around to hunt and gather.

Set the eating rations amount for the tribe.

Decide to raid or trade with other tribes.

Decide to hunt wild animals for higher food payout at a risk of injury to the hunting party.

When given the opportunity relocate your tribe to a new world.

The game is designed for the player to become attached to their tribe over the generations. To understand the different family lineages and to balance the abilities of the tribe in order to survive. For example as you head out for a raid you would not want to send all your young males/females of your tribe, loosing them before they are able to have children may cut off family lineages and may hamper your tribes ability to survive. Likewise, if a genetic mutation has produced a stonger Simpian you will attempt to make sure he/she is ideling around and having as much kids as they can.

Q

Who is the developer of Simpians?

Hello! My name is Tom Skazinski and I am the founder of Emergent Realities which has developed Simpians. Now a bit on my background, I've graduated from the University of Waterloo with an Honours BMath in Computer Science program back in 2005. Since then I've worked as a web developer at various organizations as well as an entrepreneur on various self-created hobby projects, including the creation of the Zemerge Project - an open source attempt to gather developers to create a simulation system that would simulate governance systems and would apply genetic algorithms to yield optimized solutions to various facets of decision making. The project is still in its infancy and an early alpha prototype has gained lots of positive feedback from the community.

I am highly passionate and interested in simulations and genetic algorithms, and highly supportive to the /r/simulate community. I understand that one day simulations might become the central focal aspect that combines the technological singularity with our descendants destiny. Simulations are a way for us to test and experience the adjacent realities of what could be, and even what can never be. It is a way for us to became creators of realities - gods in a classical sense, whole domains of multiverses of existences with their own rules of emergent complexity and unfolding entropy.

There is a scene in Star Trek when Q is talking to Captain Picard which has stuck in my head ever since I saw it, probably one of the most meaningful scenes in any shows I've experienced, and the quote that did it is the following:

"charting the unknown possibilities of existence"

This is why I created Simpians, I've had the idea more or less for a decade but no one would create it! I was very disappointed in Will Wright's Spore as it promised to be a evolution simulator but lacked any evolutionary mechanisms like genetics, mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift.

When my daughter was born at the beginning of 2012 I decided to finally start this idea and spend all my free time and energy, and direct my passion towards a side project that I would work on diligently day by day whenever I had free time outside my day job with the plan on finishing it someday in the future no matter how long it took. Slowly but surely, baby steps towards something gigantic and never before seen.

The timing of available developer tools (such as all the user created modules and addons for node.js) and frameworks along with the cloud computing infrastructure have made this time the perfect opportunity for a person with my expertise to be able to create something like this. I highly praise and appreciate the open source community and I will do my best to support this trend towards the future.

Nearly two years later and here I am, Simpians is now playable in a pre-alpha state, although still requires interface work and game play balancing to make the game enjoyable and fun, but the plan is to have it ready for all to experience in 2014!

In the end perhaps a game like Simpians will show everyone how important it is to live sustainably given finite resources, and how important cooperation is to survival. Perhaps Simpians will also demonstrate how humanity is really a giant single distant family as we witness genomes mix, flow, and saturate throughout this hunter gatherer population. Perhaps the data collected from Simpians will shed new insights into evolution and the study of genomics? so lets take a step forward in gaming simulation complexity to a new level and let the ancestor simulations begin!

I appreciate anyone reading this and I hope that Simpians is only the beginning of what I plan to contribute to the computational meme sphere that expands and charts the unknown possibilities of existence though simulations!

Thank you for your support and please share with anyone that might be interested!

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Press Kit

Please use the following kit link to obtain all necessary material for writing about the game. I give permission to anyone to participate in alpha release of the game to create public reviews/previews on the game.